FeibusTech Blog

When Brian Krzanich and Renee James, the newly appointed CEO and President of Intel, respectively, take over for the retiring Paul Otellini in two weeks, they won’t have to look far for things that need tending. Indeed, they will have to hit the ground running to lead Intel through what is arguably the most treacherous patch the company has encountered in its 45-year history.

Read the entire column HERE.

I dug out an old cellphone for a friend to use in a pinch. It was an LG Shine, a circa 2007 slider that was one of the glitzier feature phones in its day, albeit nothing to write home about in 2013.

Or so I thought. With all that’s packed into our smartphones today, it’s difficult to imagine the Shine as anything more than a quaint relic, an artifact harkening back to the days when consumers stole music but paid for 15-second ringtones of the same songs. But my friend was thrilled because the Shine lasted all day on a single charge. Many of us haven’t seen that since, well, 2007.

As it turned out, 2007 was in fact the year that the market began downplaying battery life in exchange for performance, features and flexibility. Of course, the catalyst for the shift was not the LG Shine, but Apple’s iPhone — the device that ushered in the modern-day smartphone era.

Could 2013 be the year that the tide turns, and battery life becomes more important again?

Read the entire column HERE.

The Windows 8 go-to-market plan last year played out like a Greek tragedy: the wounds that Microsoft endured were almost entirely self-inflicted. Like when the company violated the trust of hardware partners by disclosing at the 11th hour that it was planning to build its own-branded tablets. Or by introducing Windows 8 in late October instead of midyear, when the first systems built for the new OS were coming available. Or by taking away the Start button and forcing users to contend with the Start screen, but not doing enough to court developers so that the go-to tablet apps were available for the so-called Modern UI at launch.

I bring this up not to pile on, but to point out some encouraging signs that Microsoft may – finally – comprehend the mess it’s gotten itself into and is taking steps to right the ship. It had better. Because every quarter that passes with Windows 8 flapping in the breeze is another quarter that Android and iOS tablets become more entrenched in consumer usage patterns.

Read the entire column HERE.

How ironic that for much of the middle two days of the four-day Congress — the industry’s flagship venue for showcasing the world’s latest mobile devices, apps and transmission technology — that the network in the convention center was so taxed attendees were unable to make calls or check email for hours at a time. Playing with any of the cool new apps was out of the question. Heck, calling someone to tell them you’d be late to a meeting was a roll of the dice.

Indeed, the only reliable means of communication was going old school with it on the 160-character Dino-Net.

The paucity of bandwidth at the mobile industry’s own show underscores the urgency of the looming capacity crunch. I went to MWC, you may recall, in search of answers to a problem that, left unchecked, threatens to spoil the seemingly boundless explosion in mobile.

Read about what I learned HERE.

I’ve got quite the laundry list of new mobile device technologies to evaluate at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona this coming week. The list is even larger than the one I wrote about while en route to CES in January.

But my number one priority at MWC won’t be any of those cool new features for smartphones, tablets and PCs. First and foremost, I will be investigating alternatives for expanding wireless data capacity.

So why is a guy who makes a living analyzing mobile client technology trends paying such close attention to carrier deployment issues? It’s simple: no one will use the cool new features if the wireless network doesn’t have the capacity to support them.

Read the entire column HERE

People who have monkeys for pets should just go ahead and have kids, Jerry Seinfeld years ago joked in a standup bit about pet ownership. “If you need a pet that can roller skate and smoke cigars, it’s time to think about a family.”

When you boil it down, that’s why Microsoft’s new Surface Pro won’t rack up much in the way of sales. It’s an awful lot of computer trapped inside the body of a tablet. Which means tradeoffs.

With apologies to Seinfeld, if you’re thinking about Surface Pro ownership, then you’re so close. Just go out and get a real computer.

Most consumers will do just that. Many enterprise buyers, however, will be ordering a few Surface Pro’s. Click HERE to find out why.

In my last column, I offered PC vendors some advice on how to position Windows 8 systems. That’s not a miracle cure for solving PC players’ woes. All that will do is pry from the industry’s hand the pistol it’s using to shoot itself in the foot. PC vendors will need to do more if they want to re-inject excitement into their products and get their business back on a growth trajectory.

Here’s the bottom line: PC vendors need to incorporate model years into their product positioning. You know, like the automobile makers do.

Smartphones and tablets — the devices that are eating the PC’s lunch — exploit the model-year concept. Suppliers leverage their annual rollouts to generate pull from consumers, and consumers respond. PC vendors, meanwhile, continue to manage new releases like it’s 1999.

That’s not entirely the OEMs’ fault. But it is entirely their problem.

Implementing model years doesn’t have to be that complicated. Click HERE to find out how.

Early returns confirm what we already knew: that Windows 8’s coming-out was no party.

The problem: Windows 8 is being marketed as a touch-centric OS, and there aren’t many touch-enabled systems available.

The percentage of touch-enabled laptops that were shipped in the fourth quarter was miniscule — less than 1%, according to Digitimes Research. That number is forecasted to grow only to about 10% in 2013. Which means that more disappointing sales are on the horizon.

As I see it, the PC ecosystem has two options if it wants a shot at salvaging 2013: 1) Find a way to reverse that 90:10 ratio, so that the vast majority of systems are touch-enabled, or 2) start marketing non-touch systems to end users.

Read the entire column HERE.

If you want to get the most out of CES, you have to peer around the big TVs and pimped-out automobiles. I’ll be keeping an eye on a few key technology trends. They all have the potential to be the next big thing. But will they be? And if so, when?

Read the entire column HERE.

The battle lines between tablet vendors were so clear a year ago. Heading into the holiday season, suppliers for the most part believed that consumers wanted either a 7-inch tablet or a 10-inch tablet. This year, though, they’re offering one of each.

Apple and Amazon, two of the more visible champions for 10-inch and 7-inch devices, respectively, have since come to appreciate the other’s perspective, as they’ve rounded out their 2012 holiday lineups with tablets targeting the other’s wheelhouse. But why? Do they view size as a matter of taste, as it is with mobile phones and motor vehicles? Or do they think that the same consumers want both?

I’m here to tell you that before long, you’ll want one of each — even if you don’t right now. And tablet makers who don’t understand that emerging dynamic today will figure it out soon enough.

Read the entire column HERE.

When my pre-ordered Surface tablet arrived, as promised, on October 26th, my editor suggested I journal my first week with the new device.

Great idea. Unfortunately for her, it was me she chose to run with it.

So, a few delays. No problem.  I told myself that if she liked the idea of one week with Microsoft’s new tablet, then she’d love a column about my first two weeks with Surface. Right?

Now I’ve spent a month on the Surface. My editor may not be too thrilled that I deviated from the “one week in” concept — but Microsoft should be. Because during the first week, I wanted to throw the tablet out the window. And now I kind of like it.

Why the huge swing in perception?

Read the entire column HERE

One Microsoft Way. The irony dripping from the address of the technology giant’s headquarters never fails to tease a smile out of me.

In days gone by, the second entendre was more a commentary on the company’s heavy-handed reign over the software world. You know, like One Microsoft Way or the highway.

That’s a stark contrast to the scene today at One Microsoft Way. The company is playing catch-up in the two crucial personal electronic device markets, and must now court developers to write apps that work on its platforms.

Toward that end, the company is pitching One Microsoft Way as a benefit to developers. With so much commonality across the new Windows platforms, developers can leverage their investment by stretching apps across Windows smartphones, tablets and PCs.

That’s the message the company is serving to developers: write once and sell thrice.

How viable is the One Microsoft Way model? Read on at InformationWeek.com.

Is Microsoft really planning to sell a branded smartphone? I’d be surprised to hear otherwise.

Indeed, as the company prepares for what might be the most critical series of announcements in its 37-year history, the question isn’t whether it’s planning its own Windows Phone. Rather, it’s what Microsoft hopes to gain by releasing it.

All the smartphone buzz is coming to a head even as some PC vendors are still trying to understand why Microsoft is selling Surface, its own family of tablets built around Windows RT, the iterant of Windows 8 for ARM processors. Many of the PC suppliers are also producing Windows RT tablets, and the notion that Microsoft would be competing with them is tough to swallow. The Surface tablets–as well as many of the other RT devices–will be available on Friday, which is also the first day that consumers can take home Windows 8-based PCs from Microsoft’s hardware partners.

Microsoft’s Windows Phone 8 devices similarly would compete with smartphones produced by Microsoft’s hardware partners. So after decades of producing either peripherals that complement its partners’ products or proprietary platforms in non-PC markets–such as Xbox and Zune–Microsoft’s hardware portfolio soon will sport two devices that battle its partners’ offerings. The burning question: Why has the company decided to cross that line?

Read the entire column on InformationWeek.com.

The first Windows 8 advertisement danced its way across television screens across America during breaks in NFL football action on Sunday, and guess what? It was all about touch. Touch and tiles.

That should shock no one. Touch and tiles, that’s the essence of Windows 8’s new user interface. Swap out the new UI – Microsoft now calls it the “Modern UI” – with the Windows 7 “Start” menu and all you’d be left with are a few cosmetic changes along with some minor improvements under the hood. So if Windows 8 compels consumers to run out and buy PCs this holiday season, it will be because Modern UI is a hit. And Modern UI is all about – I’ll say it again – touch and tiles.

Pretty simple. And yet a surprising number of the Windows 8 PCs now making their way to store shelves in preparation for the October 26 launch date aren’t touch enabled. The reason: PC makers are worried that most consumers won’t be willing to shell out the money for a new laptop with touch, which adds about $100 to the price of a system.

It’s hard to fault them entirely for that line of reasoning. While there will be some Windows 8-based Ultrabooks available at mainstream, high-volume price points, many of the coolest, most lust-inducing models will be priced north of $1,000. Which means they’re not going to sell that many of them.

So the PC vendors are caught in bit of a Catch 22: They can build Windows 8 systems at prices that most consumers are willing to pay. Or they can build Windows 8 systems that most consumers will really want to buy. But they’re having trouble compressing both into the same systems – which means there’ll be a firesale for non-touch laptops come January.

Read the entire column on InformationWeek.com

In a few short weeks, buyers will get their first glimpse of this holiday season’s PCs. By most any measure, it’s an exceptional vintage of sleek, ultra-thin laptops running Windows 8. Indeed, the upcoming models represent the biggest leap over the prior year’s harvest than we’ve seen in a long time–maybe ever.

So if you set aside all the other variables that sway how consumers apportion their electronics budgets, you’d expect PC sales to swell this quarter. That’s what happened three years ago, when Microsoft replaced a dreadful OS, Windows Vista, with Windows 7. PC sales grew 22.1 percent that quarter, sharply higher than the 0.5 percent growth logged in the prior period, according to Gartner data.

Of course, you can’t set aside all the other variables. The economy has been pinching consumers’ wallets for four years now. At the same time, other exciting devices like HDTVs, smartphones, and tablets have been taking a bigger slice of those budgets.

As we head into the year’s final period, the threat level from the tablet side of the aisle is most perplexing. On the one hand, sales are slowing as many Americans who’ve craved a companion device now have one.

On the other hand sits a potentially disruptive new platform. And ironically, it’s from Microsoft–the same company that’s bringing you Windows 8. The software giant plans to release what it calls Windows RT, a tablet version of Windows 8 for ARM processors, in concert with the PC version of the new OS. Conventional Windows 8, like all previous versions of Windows, runs on x86 processors.

Along the floor space between the Windows 8 systems and Windows RT tablets is a marketing minefield that Microsoft will need to maneuver with extreme caution or the holiday season could blow up in its face.

Read the entire column on InformationWeek.com.

This is normally a nerve-wracking time of year for PC makers, because they have to place bets on the upcoming holiday selling season. Bet too much, and they’ll have to shed the overstock after New Year’s with profit-bleeding promotions. Bet too little, and their competitors will gladly fill the orders.

The Windows 8-based ultrabooks they’ll be offering are pretty cool – cool enough that the PC vendors should be betting big. But after a year of losing sales to tablets, they’re not. Their pre-season jitters are on steroids.

With that as a backdrop, you would have expected Intel CEO Paul Otellini to deliver the pep talk of his career at this year’s Intel Developer Forum (IDF). Maybe something like this: “Now, finally, we’ve got systems that address many of the shortcomings that the tablet phenomenon has exposed. So let’s go out there and take back our market!”

But he didn’t. In fact, he didn’t even speak this year. Why not?

Read the entire column on InformationWeek.com.

It’s a two-horse race right now in the smartphone market: Android on Samsung and iOS on Apple. But on the next turn, Microsoft will have a golden opportunity to nudge its thoroughbred into the pack. To achieve that, Windows Phone 8 needs to be good, but it doesn’t have to be the best platform out there.

To move the market-share needle, Microsoft will have to fix something that bothers us about the platforms we’re carrying around today. They’ll also have to solve something the carriers don’t like about Android and iOS.

Think your smartphone’s smart now? Sure, it can tap the resources of the internet to answer virtually anything you ask. But what if it could predict what information you needed? Better yet, what if your phone understood you well enough that it could offer up information you didn’t even know you needed. Now that would be a smart phone! You’ll have one someday–and sooner than you might think.

Consider this: There’s arguably no single person, no one thing that spends more time with you than your smartphone. Because of all our time together, these devices have a unique opportunity to get to know us better–maybe even better than we know ourselves. Up to now, though, they haven’t really tried.

Why not?

What our phones lack is contextual awareness, an ability to identify and filter the salient information from that data storm and present it to us, unprompted, at a time we’ll find it useful. Give our smartphones a way to track all that data and a set of tools to analyze it and we’ll be well on the way to realizing the dream of truly smart phones.

A slew of companies are laser-focused to enable context awareness. Your smartphone will be context aware – and sooner than you might think.

Read the entire column on InformationWeek.com.

When people are on the go, they don’t want to carry more than two personal electronic devices: one in the pocket and one in the bag. When a third device crops up, it’s because it addresses a shortcoming in one or both primary devices.

I’ve been saying this for more than a decade, as InformationWeek‘s Patrick Houston noted in his recent ode to the not-dead-yet PC. I believed in the two-device maxim when PDAs thrust their way onto the scene. I believed it when portable navigation devices began selling. And I still believed it as Apple prepared to bring the first media tablet to market.

These days, though, amidst the persistent flood of tablet shipments and pessimistic PC forecasts, I’ve had to defend my little two-device maxim like never before. Are we temporarily out of balance? Or is this the start of a new normal?

Read the entire column on InformationWeek.com

The ongoing land-grab by Apple, Google and Microsoft doesn’t just impact Amazon, as I explained in my post, The Death of ‘Open.’ It threatens the livelihood of anyone who wants to court customers on the internet.

A collection of retailers, including big-box brands like Wal-Mart and Target aren’t willing to cede control of mobile payments to Google Wallet. So they’ve joined forces to establish their own mobile payments alternative, as reported in today’s Wall Street Journal. The effort is called the Merchant Customer Exchange, or MCX.

This is just the start. Watch for more initiatives like this from companies who don’t want to be an after-thought when we’re shopping from our smartphones and media tablets.

When this century’s platform war first flared up, it had all the trappings of a sequel to the epic battle between Macs and PCs.

But don’t get sucked in. The current struggle between Apple, Google and Microsoft is nothing like the quaint conflict between an open and a closed system. On the contrary. In this war between the smartphone and tablet platforms, it appears that all comers agree on that issue: it is better to have a closed platform.

That plops a lot of power into just a few hands. On a closed system, the platform provider takes on the role of middleman, lodged between us and the content we consume and the stuff we buy. At a time when internet usage is shifting rapidly to smartphones and tablets – combined, they’ve already overtaken the PC in the US, according to a recent survey – this has wide-sweeping ramifications. For consumers, it might mean fewer choices and higher prices. For internet shopping outlets, it could translate into lost sales as the hardware hinders the direct line of communication you have with your customers. For Intel, Nvidia, QualComm, TI and other mobile silicon providers, it means you will need to offer an entire platform solution to compete.

Amazon, are you listening? Obviously, you are. That’s why you have your own line of tablets. And why you’re expected to come out with your own branded smartphones. It’s not a stretch to think that Amazon is developing its own OS. If I was Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos, I’d already have signed the check for that investment.

The titanic platform battle now underway more closely resembles the early days of consumer Internet connectivity than the decades-old conflict between Mac and PC. Indeed, the playing field looks more like the arena that hosted the battle for our eyeballs – that’s what they called page views in those days –between companies like AOL, Yahoo and Prodigy.

They sold proprietary, pre-packaged Internet experiences. And it worked for a little while. But as the Internet matured – and consumers along with it – they got left behind. In a sense, the old guard was peddling peepholes through a three-foot-high wall. Consumers quickly learned that they could just look over the wall without them. So they did. In retrospect, it’s astounding that they remained relevant for as long as they did.

This century’s combatants have a far better chance of succeeding because they have much more control over your portal to the internet. You couldn’t buy an AOL computer. Now, though, you can buy an iPad, with a crafted internet experience that includes a direct line to the music Apple sells, for example.

Indeed, Apple isn’t really a hardware supplier any more. Today, Apple is a content distributor. And the hardware is just a means of delivering the content.

In that sense, Apple has leapfrogged the level of power and control that record labels once enjoyed. Imagine what Columbia Records, EMI or Elektra could have accomplished if they also designed and sold us our stereo equipment.

So the issue of open versus closed has been settled. ‘Open’ lost.

Increasingly, the big players are adapting to this new world order. It helps explain why Microsoft isn’t allowing competing browsers on Windows RT tablets. And why the company is developing Surface, its own line of branded RT tablets. And why it’s only allowing a few system vendors into the fold.

It also lends credence to the speculation that Google may begin to focus future Android development on Motorola Mobility now that that acquisition is consummated.

For all their newfound power, though, there are limits to how much Apple, Google, Microsoft and – one day, maybe – Amazon can exploit it. They are still operating on the worldwide web, after all, the same wide-open connected platform that proved to be AOL’s undoing.

Consumers will pay a premium for convenience, and that’s the opportunity that smartphones and tablets afford the platform gods. It’s why 7-Eleven thrives.

There are limits to that, as 7-Eleven knows all too well. We’ll only pay so much more for a carton of milk at a convenience store. Price it too high and we’ll just put the carton back and head off to the supermarket.

Today, our browser functions as the equalizer, the great supermarket in the sky that keeps the convenience store operators honest.  But that leverage fizzles once the platform provider closes off and controls everything from your hand to your head. Apple is already there. Microsoft and Google are close behind.  And Amazon looks like it may join the pack.

We still have an open Web.  But when it comes to mobile, it’s so far looking like any countervailing open alternatives are DOA.  Without them, consumers and companies alike are facing a dim prospect — paying far more and settling for far fewer choices.

There’s a lot riding on Intel’s UltraBook initiative. The iPad juggernaut has been convincing consumers to buy tablets instead of laptops, and the computer industry is betting on UltraBooks to reverse the trend.

And now we hear from the computer counters that PC shipments dipped in the second quarter. If the blogosphere is to be believed, the data tells us that the UltraBook push is failing.

The second-quarter reports don’t bring happy news, to be sure. But there’s not one shred of insight to be had here as to success or failure of the UltraBook. It’s flat out too early to tell.

Consumers are waiting for the new generation of UltraBooks, many of which were unveiled last month and are slated to be available between now and October. Consumers are also waiting until Windows 8 is released, so they can buy the latest hardware with the latest OS.

If we’re still seeing lackluster sales data out of Gartner and IDC in two quarters, then the PC industry will have some serious trouble on its hands. Because it will have put its best foot forward. And it will have been skunked.

But a lackluster performance report for the second quarter? It doesn’t tell us a damn thing.

Oh man, what a hellish 10 days this has been.

Before we get too far, let me just warn you that when the doorbell rings, this little chat will be over. I don’t care if I’m in mid-sentence. That’s it. Period. End of story.

The reason: tucked under the arm of the hand attached to the finger pressing the doorbell will be my precious Lenovo ThinkPad. It’s been 10 days now since she sputtered and failed, and five days since I’ve last seen her. I sent her off in a box last week to rehab in Atlanta and then I packed up and hopped a plane to San Jose, in the other direction.

I returned home last night. And she’ll show up any minute, her arrival trumpeted by the chime in the entryway.

Don’t worry. This isn’t a fable on the perils of casual backup. We’ve all heard too many of those. Besides, my data was backed up, so the issue wasn’t even in play. Sort of. (If anyone knows how to tease your contacts, calendar and tasks out of Outlook when it doesn’t want to expose them, I’d love to hear from you.)

Rather, it played out more as a mash-up of Dickens’ A Christmas Carol theme, with a glimpse into a present-day vision of a computer-less future sprinkled with an insight or two from Technology Past.

I decided to load present-day Windows 7 and Office 2010 onto my nine-year-old ThinkPad x31, an ultra-portable whose time has clearly passed. Not an ideal solution by any stretch. But I had real work to do, so I wasn’t going to be without a laptop. And as I like to say, I only make room for one device in my briefcase and one in my pocket. So the tablet didn’t make the cut. And so I headed off to San Jose with nothing but an old laptop. And a smartphone. With an eTrade app.

(And, uh, my MP3 player. OK, two MP3 players.)

Tell you what: let’s cut right to lessons learned. Because as I said, once that doorbell rings…

1. Size does matter. Manipulating multiple inter-connected spreadsheets felt arduous on the X31’s 12.1-display, even though it was only 1.3 inches less than my ThinkPad X220. (Now where is that UPS driver?) Once in the Bay Area, though, I was able to reverse that deficiency thanks to a delightful 27-inch display made available to me. Except in the most extreme instances, most of us would choose a laptop over a smartphone for any serious content creation. That’s obvious.

What may not be as intuitive, though, is that the bigger-is-better tenet applies across the spectrum. For work, a 13.3-inch laptop beats a 12.1-inch laptop. And a 12.1-inch laptop trumps a 10.4-inch tablet. Sure, there are advantages to the tablet. But getting work done isn’t one of them.

2. Storage capacity does matter. Try to find a tablet with more than 32GB of flash. Yes, I know they’re out there. But $699 for a new iPad with 64GB? Hell, I can’t even squeeze everything I want into my 32GB MP3 player! Storage was a big deal on my trip. I frequently swapped files with a couple of flash drives and a USB hard disk. And the X31 has a 100GB hard drive!

3. The cloud does matter. I much prefer to physically have what I need in hand, locally. That said, the past 10 days would have gone much smoother had I been taking advantage of all those storage services up there in the sky. Nothing like leaving the barn door open to teach you what you needed to know yesterday.

Hmmm. Come to think of it, maybe this is a why-you-should-back-up story. Whatever the case, I can tell you that next time…

Computer’s here. See ya!

May you live in interesting times. It’s an ancient curse. Or is it a blessing? There are volumes devoted to that age-old issue. In my world, though, there’s nothing gray about this topic. I get paid to answer questions, so interesting times are a blessing. Straight up. When clients don’t have any questions, now that’s a curse.

These are blessed times we live in, my friends. At least it is in my world. It’s hard to believe that it’s only been two years since Apple sold the first iPad. The year before, the tech world marveled at the vitality of the PC. Incredibly, shipments grew in 2009, defying gravity at a time when the rest of the economy seemed to be in a free-fall. My, how things have changed.

Today, many of you now are busy chiseling the epitaph onto the face of the laptop’s tombstone. Sorry, I don’t mean to spoil the ending. I know you’re still working. But from what I gather, it’s going to read something like this:

“Here lies the laptop
Sluggish, heavy, unresponsive
We’d miss you
If we didn’t all have iPads”

You might want to put the funeral plans on hold for a while, though, because the PC is about to get interesting again. The ecosystem, sparked by Intel’s Ultrabook initiative, has been hard at work trying to erase its shortcomings, which together singed a hole in the market wide enough to drive more than 100 million media tablets through.

I’m fond of saying that equilibrium for personal electronics stands at two devices, one in the pocket and one in the briefcase. When we buy a third device, it’s for picking up the slack for one or both primary devices.

If you’ve strolled down the aisle of a commercial flight during the past year, you might conclude that what the iPad brought to the computing world was Solitaire. I’m being facetious, of course, though the real answer is interrelated.

First and foremost, the tablet is tackling the laptop’s deficient battery life. It’s giving us a chance to read, watch a movie — and yes, play Solitaire — without siphoning any of the juice needed for productivity apps.

That’s how the tablet pushed its way alongside the laptop in our briefcases. That it’s a more recline-friendly form factor, that it boasts superior battery life, that it’s easier and quicker to engage and access is why we’re turning to it more and more.

Many of us still opt for the laptop for more creation-centric tasks. But because the tablet is more accessible, it wins out for anything that we can do equally well on either device, like researching something on the web.

So there’s a lot riding on the PC ecosystem’s response, which kicks off in earnest at the Computex trade show next week in Taiwan. It will be the coming-out party for dozens of new laptop models. They’re sleek and sexy. They’re more responsive. They boast better battery life.

Many of them are convertible clamshells that double as tablets for reading, gaming and watching video. Some have touchscreens or offer them as an option.

If you have a tablet and a laptop, these new portables probably won’t convince you to go back to one device. But if you’re deciding whether to buy your first tablet or replace your current system, I’ll bet that one of these new laptops will lure you in.

All in all, a good first step toward bringing us back to equilibrium, and a good reason to put off finishing that tombstone.

—-

Original post: http://betanews.com/2012/06/01/say-ipad-idolaters-dont-write-the-laptops-epitaph-just-yet//. Reprinted with permission.

Wow, what a swirl of good-news/bad-news last week for the media tablets aimed at the ereader market. As it turns out, the roller-coaster ride continues this week.

comScore reported that the Kindle Fire from Amazon generated far more Internet activity in February than any other Android media tablet. Then a few days later, Microsoft dumped $300 million into a Barnes & Noble ebook venture, a move spurred in part by the success of the bookseller’s media tablet, the Nook Tablet.

I wrote a column explaining why the Kindle Fire and the Nook Tablet, the first- and third-highest selling Android tablets in 2011, respectfully are so successful — and what that means for hardware vendors who want to make it in the tablet market.

And then the roller coaster began hurtling earthward.

Target confirmed rumors that it is tossing Amazon’s Kindle line-up out of its chain of department stores. Target was coy as to exactlywhy, though fellow writer Ed Oswald offered up a few possible explanations.

I suspect it has to do with Target’s new pilot program that will put Apple boutiques in 25 of its stores. (That’s possibility #2 in Ed’s article if you’re scoring at home.) Apple knows what powerful draw its products generate and exploits that in its relationships up and down the supply chain. It’s why Verizon invested millions two-and-a-half years ago to elevate Android: to level the playing field in the smartphone market by giving iPhone a legitimate competitor. It’s also why Verizon is looking to prop up Windows Phone during this year’s selling season.

And then late last week, Joe Wilcox raised another possible reason: that Target dumped the Kindle Fire because it’s no longer selling. He pointed to first-quarter data from IDC that estimated sharply lower shipments of the Kindle Fire in the year’s first quarter — 700,000 units down from 4.7 million.

I find it difficult to believe that Target, a retailer well accustomed to consumer buying patterns, would toss Amazon due to a seasonal letdown in sales. As it turns out, the IDC report, while technically accurate, is a bit misleading.

Kindle Fire shipments, or deliveries by Amazon to thousands of stores as well as to Amazon’s own warehouses, fell off a cliff, not actual sales. That’s normal for the year’s first quarter — Apple’s quarter-on-quarter shipments also dipped, as did total tablet shipments, according to IDC. You would expect Kindle Fire shipments to fall far faster than the industry during that time, because the fourth quarter was the Kindle Fire’s inaugural quarter, so retailers had to build up their holiday stock from scratch.

Sales, actual purchases of Kindle Fires by consumers, were seasonally strong in the first quarter, according to NPD. Consumers bought about 1.8 million Kindle Fires in the first quarter, compared to 3.8 million in the fourth quarter of 2011. That’s seasonally down, yes. But the Kindle Fire still sold “pretty darn well” in the first quarter, says NPD’s Stephen Baker.

So let’s see if we can’t get Kindle Fire news back on an even keel. One thing’s for sure: all this perceptual yo-yo’ing doesn’t change the fact that the Kindle Fire is a well-designed and well-positioned tablet that is successful because it sidesteps the iPad rather than challenging it head-on, like so many other wannabe’s in this market.

On the other hand, the Kindle Fire’s success may be why Apple has painted a target on its back — and why it isn’t welcome back at Target.

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Original post:http://betanews.com/2012/05/08/kindle-fire-sales-are-still-hot/. Reprinted with permission.